Ohio households have slow Internet speeds, report shows

COLUMBUS, Ohio (CGE) – There has been a lot of talk this year that Ohio needs to move at the speed of business, if it’s to reclaim any significant part of its former prosperity that for been slipping away piecemeal over the past 30 or more years.

In today’s world where moving at the speed of business is all about moving at the speed of the Internet, Ohio’s eyes may be bigger than its stomach when it comes to moving the needle on job creation, which increasingly is done over the Internet.

As hopeful and inspiring as Gov. John Kasich’s idea is to create a cadre of business savvy professionals who talk the talk and walk the walk when it comes to convincing existing companies that state resources are available to help them expand or luring a new company to move to Ohio, as was recently tried when Kasich’s raiders offered Sears $400 million to switch cities from Chicago to Columbus, one stumbling block along the road to prosperity is the speed of the Internet in Ohio.

Results of the fourth annual Speed Matters survey of Internet speeds shows that the U.S. has not made significant improvement in the speeds at which residents connect to the Internet.

The study, a project of Communications Workers of America, also showed that 56 percent of Ohio households have Internet speeds that are below minimum national standards.

Over the last year, Ohio residents who have gone to speedmatters.org to check the speed of their Internet connections have found that they, like people in the entire country, lag behind. The results also show that there is a digital divide in high-speed Internet connections.

Ohio, the report said, ranks 41st in the nation in Internet speeds. In a world ranking, the United States, with an average download speed of 3.0 megabytes per second (Mbps), is 25th. Number one is South Korea (34.1 mbps) seventh is Sweden (22.2 mbps), eighth is Netherlands (20.7 mbps), ninth is Romania (20.3 mbps) and 10th is Japan (18.0 mbps).

The median download speed for the United States is 3.0 mbps and the median upload speed was 595 kilobits per second.

The FCC has developed the National Broadband Plan to help the U.S. catch up with the rest of the world. But the report said that almost half of all U.S. household connections fail to meet the minimum broadband speed standard of 4 mbps download and 1 mbps upload. And only one percent meet the FCC goal of 50 mpbs download and 20 mbps upload by 2015.

Ohio Internet Speed Report

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